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“How are we here then?” Evar lowered her reluctantly to her feet. Letting her slide slowly down the length of him. “And why”—he looked at the northern horizon where brightness showed, the first after more than a month of rain clouds coming in a grey tide—“why do I feel watched?”

A coldness infected the wind, and the rain grew chill. Shadows, which had been washed away by the endless downpour, returned, reaching to the south.

Livira stepped back, looking at the sky. Her brow furrowed; anger showed. “This is my book!”

—

“Remarkable!”

“Lord Algar?” Algar’s bodyguard, Jons, turned from his study of the aisle stretching before him to where Algar sat with his back to the shelves.

Algar rubbed the bridge of his nose, trying to squeeze away the spiking headache that had made him look up from the page. The vision in his single eye had grown blurry.

This is my book. It had almost been as if it were written in the knowledge that he would read it. The pain and the blur had struck as he read those words.

It had been one of the soldiers who had pointed to the hairline crack that had followed them across the chamber with the shelf-towers and back into the room they’d been trapped in for so long by the skeer. Even her sharp eyes would not have noticed it but for the escape of a faint black mist.

Nobody had an explanation for the crack following them wherever they went. This omen, combined with the heavy losses caused by what seemed to have been a single pair of canith, meant morale had been low on their return. The damned things had nearly got him too. The swing of a white sword had left a shallow cut running between his collarbones. Had the blow been a fraction higher and deeper it would have made an end of him. Though minor, the wound still burned and wept blood, and the centre circle wasn’t safe to return to.

Algar felt the weight of their situation bearing down on him. Black demons had driven them from the circle where they’d survived these past weeks. The chamber into which Yute’s rebels had fled held threats as bad or worse than the skeer that seemed to have been driven from it.

Algar had sought distraction in the second of the books they’d taken from the duster girl. The so-called librarian that Yute kept as a pet. She had blinded them with the first book. This second one showed no immediate magics to match the darkness springing from the first, but she must have kept it for a reason. He had wondered if its magics were written into it more deeply. They must be.

The rest of the king’s war party was spread around the aisles, gathering themselves after the canith attacks, giving closer attention to hastily bound wounds, taking stock. The prisoners had been secured near the centre of the group. Algar closed the book and stood up. One of the captives appeared to be wearing librarians’ robes. Old, weathered, and torn, but still just about recognisable.

Once he was on his feet, he saw with a stifled gasp that almost invisible cracks radiated out in all directions from where he’d been sitting. Additional fractures even ringed the spot with several concentric circles as if a great hammer had struck exactly where he’d sat. Algar backed away in shock and faintly—so faintly—the library’s silence cracked around him, a single hairline fracture tracing its way across the floor, arrowing towards his feet.

With a frown he moved the book left then right. The crack meandered after it, first one way, then the other.

The book! The book was the source. Algar considered handing it to Jons in case the thing might be harmful. But no, the girl had carried it with her. He barked a short laugh of surprise. Nothing in all the years of research under the king and his forefathers had ever made so much as a scratch on the stuff of the library. Nothing in the histories reported any different result from societies that had conquered the skies and built weapons that levelled not only cities but continents. Yet here in his hand, a simple, crudely put together book of aimless love stories was carving through it before his eyes.

Algar set off in search of the prisoners. Soon, muffled sounds of pain led him to them. The soldiers had a ritual they called “tenderising the meat.” A grand name for a beating meant to take the fight out of new captives, but it served a double purpose, hinting at the fate awaiting them.

Three troopers had a tall, skinny young man on his feet, hands tied behind his back. They took turns in landing blows on him, waiting for him to turn towards the source before striking from a different angle. A gag reduced his cries to grunts and gasps.

“Leave that man alone.” Algar strode towards them, relying on the resting soldiers who cluttered the aisle to move their legs before he reached them.

“My lord.” The trio around the man stepped back.

“Take his gag off.” Algar studied the prisoner, who stood hunched around his pain. Skinny, sunburned, dirty but not with the same grime that stained the king’s men. His robe looked to have been worn thin by hard use, torn in many places. “This is no way to treat a librarian.”

The shortest of the three tormentors, a swarthy man with a thick black beard, yanked the gag away.

“What’s your name, young man?”

“A-Arpix.” Blood ran from the corner of his mouth and one eye was already swelling closed.

“Well, Arpix.” Algar smiled the smile he had used for his children when they were small. “I want you to tell me all about this book.”